In the Being of beings, the negating of the Nothing
(das Nichten des Nichts) comes to pass. --
Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik?

In his Colloquy article of November, 1999 Professor Dye opined that
Heidegger is "the 20th-century's most important philosopher." In this essay
I challenge that claim on three grounds: his Nazism, his anti-Semitism, and
the fact that from the mid-thirties on he did not want to be called a
philosopher nor did he want what he was producing to be called philosophy,
desires which I believe we should honor. Let me say first of all that I am
aware that Heideggerians have a number of standard strategies which they
use to defend their master against detractors, of which there has never
been a shortage. Two of the most interesting are 1.) to argue that only
those who are thoroughly acquainted with "the entire body of his thought" in
the original German are qualified to criticize him, and even more interesting
2.) to claim with Derrida that only those who are "bound up with Heidegger in
an essential way" can measure "the full significance" of his work (Farias x).
I also expect to be accused of offering mere ad hominem arguments, but for
reasons given below I believe the approach I am taking here is justified in the
case of Heidegger.

I confess immediately that I have read very little of Heidegger and what
I have read was in English translation, and I did not find it to my taste. On
the other hand, I confess also to having been somewhat obsessed with
Heidegger's life and career as described in a number of biographies and with
the "Heidegger wars" as detailed in other works which are listed in the
bibliography. How, in fact, could a Catholic classical philologist not be curious
about someone who set out twice to become a priest, who began his career
philosophizing in the scholastic mode and ended up a dedicated Nazi who paid
dues to the party faithfully until l945 and never condemned the Holocaust?
(Should a thinker be considered great or even "important" who was unable to
recognize great evil, even the greatest of evils?) How could one interested
in languages not be curious about a scholar who is reported to have said that
only two languages are suitable for philosophizing, ancient Greek and German,
who said that when the French begin to think seriously they must switch to
German (Farias 7), who claimed that his "thought" could not be translated
only paraphrased, who imagined "Being as language," who believed that Being
revealed itself in the etymology of words, and who asserted that "I don't
speak the language, the language speaks me."

The standard explanation of Heidegger's followers for his behavior
during the Nazi period is this: Heidegger only agreed to serve as FuehrerRektor of the University of Freiburg to save the German university, he
"severed links to the movement when he realized its true nature and
criticized it in his later writings," and he was never an anti-Semite. "This
version...is largely due to Heidegger himself" [i.e. to what he said and wrote
after l945]. There now seems, however, to be a consensus that revelations
contained in Victor Farias' book, Heidegger and Nazism, have made this
defense untenable, based as it was on Heidegger's own distortions and lies
(Farias l37, 258). It now appears that his commitment to National Socialism
was "deep and long-lasting" and philosophically based (Sheehan 30). We are
also told that in retirement after l945 Heidegger was visited by a steady
stream of former students and colleagues who begged him to repudiate
Nazism and condemn the Holocaust, but he remained silent. Moreover, a list
of sins, both of commission and omission, dating from his tenure as Fuehrer
Rektor has come to light which is very long indeed. Farias gives the following
account:

Among the measures brought in during his rectorship were: the
expulsion of all Jews on the teaching staff; a questionnaire for each
teacher showing racial origin; ... the obligatory oath for all teachers
concerning the purity of their race; the obligation to use the Nazi
salute at the beginning and end of each class; the organization of the
University Department of Racial Matters, to be directed by the SS, who
were responsible for organizing courses to be taught by a specialist
from the Institute of Racial Purity in Berlin, directed by Professor
Eugen Fischer; ...economic help for student members of the SA and the
SS, or other military groups, and refusal of aid to Jewish and Marxist
students; the obligation to attend classes on racial theory, military
science, and German culture (119).

This list could be greatly expanded: for example, Heidegger condoned
the burning of books "written by Jews" and other "intellectual delinquents"
(Farias 122) (the full quote is too obscene to print here); Heidegger was
responsible for two "political denunciations," one of a colleague Hermann
Staudinger, "a future nobel laureate in chemistry," and the other a former
student (Lilla 43); when a house that belonged to a Jewish student group was
attacked (6/28/33), Heidegger declined to get involved because some of the
attackers were non-students; he was a regular lecturer at the "Advanced
School for German Politics" along with Alfred Rosenberg, Eugen Fischer,
Goebbels, Goering, Rudolf Hess and Ernst Krieck (Farias 208-9); among his
more notorious statements were the claim that "the Fuehrer, and he alone,
is the sole German reality and law, today and in the future," (Lilla 43) that
Hitler was "the dispensation of a new disclosure of truth and hence a
fundamental transformation of Being," (Nolte quoted in Sheehan 34) and his
reference to the "inner truth and greatness of National Socialism," a phrase
which he declined to delete or alter although given the opportunity in 1953 by
the publisher of a new edition of his Introduction to Metaphysics (Farias227).

Anyone who still has doubts about Heidegger's anti-Semitism should
read Thomas Sheehan's article "A Normal Nazi" (N.Y. Review of Books,
1/14/93) or "Is Heidegger Anti-Semitic?" (chapter 14 of Martin Heidegger,Between Good and Evil).

Heidegger did not lack detractors during his lifetime. Croce called
Heidegger's Rektoratsrede "stupid and obsequious." He predicted that
Heidegger's philosophy would be successful for a while because "the empty
and general pronouncement is always successful." (Farias 111) After
hearing one of Heidegger's speeches, Walter Jaensch, a professor of
medicine at Berlin, stated that "the Heideggerian variant of existential
philosophy was only schizophrenic babblings, banalities with an appearance of
depth which could come only from a sickened mind." He observed that no one
in the audience "had understood a thing." (Farias 204) (It was a
commonplace that Heidegger was famous only because no one could
understand what he was saying.)

Some of Heidegger's statements do indeed make one wonder about his
sanity: Karl Jaspers reports that when he asked Heidegger, "How do you
think a man as coarse as Hitler can govern Germany?" Heidegger answered,
"Culture is of no importance. Look at his marvelous hands!" (Farias 118)
And then there is his bizarre and obscene comparison of "the extermination
technology of the concentration camps to various forms of agricultural
technology." (Farias xi)

With reference to the nature of Heidegger's "thought", John Caputo in
his brilliant book The Mystical Element in Heidegger, a work that has been
praised extravagantly by reviewers as a model of scholarship, has called
attention to Heidegger's indebtedness to Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260
1327/8), "the father of German mysticism" and has shown that the
structure of Heidegger's thought is analogous to that of Eckhart. Caputo
explains that according to Heidegger "His thinking is no longer philosophy but
arises out of the end of philosophy, just as it is no longer metaphysics but
results from overcoming metaphysics, and as it no longer has to do with
what metaphysics calls Being, but with the 'It' which 'gives' Being...."
Heidegger sought "a non-conceptual, non-discursive, non-representational
kind of 'thinking' which is profoundly divided from any of the traditional
varieties of 'philosophy.'" (4) Heidegger wanted to be a great thinker such
as Heraclitus or Parmenides who antedated Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
He considered what he produced not philosophy but "thought" or "essential
thought."

Some students of Heidegger have called his thought "mysticism for
atheists." One of his colleagues said Heidegger had founded a private religion,
a "theology without God," and he labeled the appeal of his work "religious".
Karl Jaspers called Heidegger a "mystagogue-cum-sorcerer." Caputo said
Heidegger "dwelt in the proximity of poetry and mysticism." He represents
"neither rationalism nor irrationalism." An American philosopher, William
Barrett, wrote that "a German friend of Heidegger told me that one day
when he visited Heidegger he found him reading one of Suzuki's books [on Zen
Buddhism]: 'If I understand this man correctly,' Heidegger remarked, 'this is
what I have been trying to say in all my writings.'"

Perhaps we should call Heidegger's work prose poetry; alternatively we
might try interpreting it as myth. (Exposed on a mountain side as an infant
and suckled by a she-bear, Being is rescued and reared in concealment by
shepherds, forgotten by nearly everyone, but upon reaching manhood, after
negating nihilism and slaying the dragon of technology, he/it is recognized as
authentic, wins the hand of the princess in marriage and ascends to the
throne.) Whatever it is, most philosophers in the analytic tradition pay
absolutely no attention to Heidegger and would not call his thought philosophy
inasmuch as it lacks definitions, arguments, reasons and clarity. A friend
reported to me that at a recent meeting of American philosophers a speaker
said "Heidegger should be condemned and his works ignored," and the
audience burst into applause.

I conclude with the report of an incident involving Karl Loewith, one of
his colleagues and author of Heidegger: Thinker in a Time of Need, who
encountered him in Italy in l936: "Two years after resigning the rectorate
Heidegger was lunching in the Alban hills with Nazi-party insignia still affixed
to his lapel. When told by Loewith that his philosophy had been unfairly
tarnished by his party activities, Heidegger corrected him explaining that the
concept of 'historicity' as outlined in Beingand Time had been the real
inspiration of his political engagement." Could there be a greater
condemnation of a system of thought?

If Caputo is right, Heidegger thought he had left behind not only all
metaphysics but ethics too, in the ordinary sense, (the "metaphysics of
morals"). Heidegger was concerned not with behavior but with "the essence
of Man." The result was a kind of passivity and mystical quietism, but it is
one thing to throw oneself into the arms of a loving God as Meister Eckhart
recommended (Gelassenheit); it is quite another thing to abandon oneself to
the "inscrutable play of Being" especially when one of the players is National
Socialism. A true philosopher must have wisdom, both theoretical and
practical, and at least since the time of Socrates, there has been a
connection between philosophy and virtue. Heidegger fails both the test for
practical wisdom and the test for virtue.